Britain at a crossroads

Change was in the air in January 1914 – but no one anticipated the slaughter
that was to begin that summer

On the move: a policeman holds up traffic at Ludgate Circus in London, in January 1914Photo: Getty Images

By Mark Bostridge

12:01AM GMT 01 Jan 2014

A hundred years ago today, on January 1 1914, many people in Britain awoke to the new year with a sense of foreboding about the future. The Archbishop of York, Cosmo Gordon Lang, gave expression to this feeling in his New Year message when he warned that 1914 “may well prove a very fateful year in the history of our land”.

Reading Lang’s words now, one is struck at first by how prescient they seem; but this is an illusion produced by the distortion of hindsight. In fact, the Archbishop wasn’t suggesting that war with Germany, so frequently imagined and predicted in Britain during the early years of the 20th century, was likely to break out in the course of 1914. Instead, his message referred to three violent challenges to the established order that appeared either imminent or were already taking place: a civil war in Ireland, class conflict and a sex war.

The direst portents were reserved for the Irish situation. The Asquith Government’s plans for a Home Rule Bill were provoking resistance in Ulster, increasing fears that Unionists and Nationalists would soon be at each other’s throats in bloody combat, both sides having amassed vast supplies of arms and ammunition, and that the conflict might spread quickly to the mainland.

Strike action in Britain was widespread, threatening to paralyse large parts of the country. The dramatic levels of industrial unrest, dating back to the large-scale, sometimes violent disputes of two to three years earlier, remained high, and 1914 threatened an increase in industrial action even greater than that of the previous year.

There was a stark reminder of this within the Archbishop’s own diocese. A strike by Leeds corporation workmen, starting a fortnight before Christmas, had meant that the city’s streets at New Year were shrouded in darkness, the cotton mills were running on short time, and, in churches, evensong was being conducted by lantern light.

In early January, Londoners shivered in freezing temperatures as workers in the coal trade came out on strike for increased pay, followed shortly afterwards by a strike of the carmen responsible for distributing coal around the capital.

Finally, on Lang’s checklist of the “Perils of 1914”, “the war of women” being waged by the suffragettes, in their desperate struggle to win the vote, had entered a new phase. The numbers of the Pankhursts’ militant supporters might have declined to a smaller band of fanatical adherents over the course of almost a decade of activism. But these women, their commitment to the cause reignited by each fresh cycle of the hunger striking and forcible feeding they experienced in prison at Holloway, were becoming more daring in their assaults on public and private property.

Most disturbing of all, a dangerous escalation in the violence associated with the more extreme acts of militancy was beginning to undermine the suffragettes’ principled stand against damage to life and limb, and their accepted rule that the only lives that could be lost were the militants’ own.

And what of that ultimate threat, the spectre of European war that had haunted Britain for so long? Over time its power of engendering fear had steadily diminished. There was much talk at the start of 1914 about “the enemy within”, though the alleged presence of German agents in enormous numbers throughout Britain, said to be masquerading mostly as waiters and barbers, was mostly a figment of overheated imaginations.

But as for the possibility of war itself, the words of HG Wells held true: “A threat that goes on for too long ceases to have the effect of a threat.” At the outset of the year the minds of officialdom were concentrated on the commemoration of two significant anniversaries that betokened peace. The first, falling at the end of the year, would mark the centenary of the Treaty of Ghent, and 100 years of peace between the two great English-speaking nations, Britain and the United States.

The second, still more than a year off, was already being planned by the British government, anxious not to offend France, once Britain’s traditional enemy but now her cherished entente partner. This was the centenary of the Battle of Waterloo: 100 years since a British army had drawn blood in Western Europe.

Some readers, opening their newspapers on January 1, must have breathed a sigh of relief. For there, in leading articles, were reports of friendly remarks about Anglo-German relations made by the Liberal government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. In an interview, David Lloyd George had attacked the extravagance of Britain’s new naval estimates, put forward by his Cabinet colleague Winston Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty, which included the construction of another four Dreadnoughts, in order to maintain a target of 60 per cent superiority over Germany in the building of these revolutionary battleships.

Lloyd George’s reasoning about the need to reduce defence spending was clear. “Our relations with Germany are infinitely more friendly than they have been for years,” the chancellor declared. “Britain and Germany seem to have realised… that there is nothing to gain and everything to lose by a quarrel and that they have everything to gain and nothing to lose by reverting to the old policy of friendliness which had been maintained, until recent years, for centuries between Germany and this country.”

Britain’s celebrations to welcome 1914 embraced popular elements of modern life, as well as more established traditions. The craze for flying, as a spectator and participatory sport, across all social classes, was reflected in a display at Hendon, in north London, during which an aviator piloting a Grahame-White biplane, with a powerful search light attached to his machine, flew into the New Year on the stroke of midnight.

Across the country, people observed a venerable tradition, opening the back door of their houses to let the old year out. For luck, the first person they allowed through the front door was a dark-haired man, carrying bread, salt and coal to ensure that everyone in the house would have sufficient to eat, enough money, and be protected from the cold in the year ahead.

There was certainly ice everywhere and widespread snow, giving west Yorkshire the chance to show off its new motorised snow-shifters for the first time. In Sandwich, in Kent, a flock of sheep was drowned in a ditch during a severe snowstorm.

It was the prevalence of tango displays and competitions, as part of New Year celebrations at London hotels and restaurants, that elicited most public comment, and set off a wave of controversy in the press. The popularity of this erotically charged, imported dance – already banned by the Kaiser in Germany and denounced by the Vatican for its immorality – was immediately seized upon as evidence of the moral decay facing Britain.

Worried voices were raised expressing fears that Britain was becoming too lax and decadent, a development partly attributable to the astonishing rise, by as much as a fifth, in the country’s material prosperity over the past decade, and that this might have disastrous consequences for the “moral fibre” of the British Empire itself.

Other commentators took comfort, though, in the response to two recent national tragedies: to the courage shown by Englishmen during the sinking of the Titanic, 20 months earlier, and to the more recent example of heroism provided by Scott, Wilson, Bowers and Oates on their ill-fated British Antarctic expedition to the South Pole.

In the first days of 1914, the British Museum placed the originals of Scott’s journals, with their desperately poignant farewell, on exhibition, to intense public interest. The display was intended “to enforce the lesson which was often in Captain Scott’s mind during the latter days of his great march… that the men of English race can face death without flinching for the honour of their nation”; a highly ironic comment given the national catastrophe that was to ensue only six months later.

By the end of 1914, some 80,000 British men would have sacrificed their lives in a war that most people had by then come to recognise would be a long-drawn-out struggle for victory.